Is that a Samsung Galaxy Note 7 in your pocket, or are you just on fire?
While political dramas and soap operas continue to swirl around us, there is also a great deal of commotion and energy in the smartphone market this week. Samsung has announced that after experiencing multiple design failures resulting in product “malfunctions” (phones catching fire), that product replacements will be halted, and product sales and production will be stopped indefinitely. The market responded by slashing $17 billion in value from the firm, an 8% drop. That’s massive.
Concurrent with this, competitors are piling on, hoping and expecting to reap benefits from this in the form of extra sales and production opportunities. As the saying goes, “one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor.”
Coincidently two major brands are announcing new forays into this hyper-dynamic market space: Google’s new Pixel phone, and tweeted pre-release info from Kodak. Especially interesting owing to the increasing importance of self-own picture taking capability, the Kodak phone could not only revive this venerated brand, but be a game changer in the evolution of handheld devices.
Image credit: Eastman Kodak Company
What will hopefully not get missed in all of this will be the lessons potentially learned from the Galaxy meltdowns. That is, the importance of product testing and quality engineering.
Optimation is expert in validation and rigorous testing. Subjecting products — whether medical devices, high-pressure oil field instruments, or consumer devices, the criticality of knowing with certainty the failure modes and safety boundaries for performance is essential. Given what happened to the Note 7, and other devices such as laptop batteries, one must wonder about the diligence applied to the testing of these technologies and the standards to which they were held.
If you design or make products, then you are accountable to the claims you make and the performance they deliver. Contact Optimation for help in setting and keeping your product performance promises.
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